A day at the fair

Tossing it back 2010. 

We took my Mom to the Rochester Fair in Rochester, NH. At this point she was 100 and having grown up on a farm in Alabama she had wondered quite aloud why we were dragging her to a country fair.

Once her lips got ahold of the homemade ice cream and other culinary evils of fair food, she was hooked.

Just before this photo was taken we had visited the poultry area where I was mesmerized by the sounds of a chicken clearly in distress.

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked Mary of Alabammybrook Farm.

She and Martin gave me the same look, one that shifted from shock to disbelief to my poor, poor New York-born idiot/daughter/wife.

“She’s hatching,” my mother said.

Cool! Count me in!

After waiting for what seemed like forever, an egg finally popped out. Martin and my Mom moved on, leaving me with the egg and the chicken who was so over it.

A couple of minutes later Martin returned and said they were heading over to see the cows. I told him I was waiting.

“For what?

“Another egg.”

He paused in that way husbands pause when they know their next words could be their last. He measured his words carefully.

“You know chickens hatch once a day, right?”

A quicker liar would have said, “Uh, yeah, I knew that!”

Not me. I don’t know why, but I think I was so caught up in seeing my first egg that all commonsense and basic knowledge of biology went out the window. 

“We’re heading over to the cows,” was his only response.

Looking at this photo I remember this as one of the bestest days and I can still hear the howls of laughter at the other end of the barn as mother and son-in-law bonded even more over the city slicker.